In Holy Weeks past I have
reprinted in the Pastor's Page a fascinating report on the evidence
found within the Shroud of Turin pointing to a DOUBLE CROWN OF THORNS.
The report, written by Shafer Parker, Jr., appeared in the April 13,
2003 issue of the National Catholic
Register. May I share it with you once again, with extensive
abridgment.

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Shroud's TWO Crowns of Thorns
Show Crucifixion's Brutality.

Two researchers at Duke
University Medical. Center say they have perceived signs of a SECOND
object in the head area of the image of the Shroud of Turin.

Dr. Alan Whanger, professor
emeritus at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. and director
of the Council for Study of the Shroud of Turin, (www.shroudcouncil.org)
together with his wife, Mary, published their finding that high-grade
enhanced photographs of the Shroud of Turin reveal the image of a band
of woven straw. It perfectly matches the size and shape of the
well-known Crown of Thorns now housed in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
This circlet would have rested on the back of Jesus' head reaching down to the
upper part of the neck.

The shroud, a sheet of fine
linen some 14 feet long and 3.54 feet wide, contains the life-sized
negative image, front and back, of a crucified man, complete
with nail prints and bloodstains. Pope
John Paul II himself has venerated it as the shroud that Christ was
buried in. According to the Whangers, the newly perceived object is
actually a second crown of thorns.
And although Scripture has never been interpreted as mentioning two
crowns, Whanger argues that his discovery of a second crown is yet more
proof that the man represented on the shroud is Jesus. "Two crowns would be entirely consistent
with what WE know about the period," he said. "If the shroud were
actually a MEDIEVAL forgery based ONLY upon Gospel accounts, as some
scientists have claimed, they'd never have thought to include TWO
separate crowns."

Whanger, who is a Methodist,
suggests that when Pilate sent Jesus to be flogged, the soldiers
naturally decided to mock the supposed King of the Jews as a ROMAN
EMPEROR, complete with purple robe (which is mentioned in the
Gospels), with an encircling crown on
the back of the head. It would have been the work of a moment,
he says, to twist a few bands of straw together, stick a few thorns and
thistles through the back and then jam it on Christ's head.

Later, the soldiers must have
been inspired to mock Jesus as a Jewish HIGH PRIEST, which led to the
construction of the larger, bonnet-like crown made from the Gundelia
Tournefortil thorn tree, as confirmed on the shroud by Avinoam Danin,
Professor of botany at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a world
authority on the flora of the Near East.

The GUNDELIA TREE possesses
thorns so sharp and strong the maker would have been forced to wear
leather gloves. The larger crown, first identified on the shroud
by the Whangers several years ago, effectively mocked the multi-tiered crown worn by the
Jewish high priest. "The high priest's crown would have been well known
to the soldiers," the Whangers said, "since it was kept locked in the Antonia
Fortress and only released to the high priest for his use during
festivals."

Finding a second crown on
the shroud helps explain why the Crown of Thorns in Paris has no
thorns. Because the thorns had merely been stuck through the straw
bands to begin with, they either remained embedded in the crucified
man's neck when the crown was removed, or they fell from the mid-forehead to the low back
of the neck. The wounds on the TOP would have come from the bonnet-like
high priest's crown, while those on the NECK would have come from the
emperor's circlet.

Though impossible to
authenticate as to date, the shroud has been venerated since at least
the 14th century (but possibly as early as the second century) as the
actual winding sheet used at Jesus' burial in the tomb of Joseph of
Arimathea.

But it has only been in the last 30 years that modern science has been
able to uncover a number of clues, including pollen spores and
microscopic grains of soils UNIQUE to Jerusalem and Palestine, that
increase the probability that the shroud once wrapped the Messiah's
body.

Abiding Mystery But the abiding mystery is HOW
the images of a crucified man and crucifixion-related objects
become IMPRINTED on the shroud
at all.

Canadian physicist, Thaddeus
Trenn, director of the science and religion program at the
University of Toronto, has
hypothesized that a massive influx of energy similar to a CONTROLLED
NUCLEAR EVENT actually overcame the strong force that bound together
the protons and the neutrons in the body of the man lying in the
shroud.

Such an instantaneous event
would have released MASSIVE amounts of X-rays, leading to a rapid, BUT
COOL, DEHYDRATION of the cellulose fibers in the fabric that resulted
in a NEGATIVE image of the man and, due to the enormous amounts of
energy present, a CORONAL discharge that led to imprints of OTHER items
buried with the body.

Trenn has noted that this
dematerialization theory is supported by DISTORTIONS in the shroud
image that indicate that it was COLLAPSING in upon itself AT THE
PRECISE MOMENT that the image was being produced. And only
dematerialization explains how the body could have been lifted away
from the blood that had soaked into the fabric while leaving no trace
of pulled fibrils on the fabric's surface.... [Emphasis added].

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Throughout
today's society Satan's influence can be perceived in any number of
ways, one of them being the tsunami of pornography in which our culture
is drowning, with resultant degradation of human dignity, desecration
of the institution of marriage, and, more destructive still, the
placing of immortal souls in very real danger of everlasting damnation.
"No impure person has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of
God." (Ephesians 5:5). Satanic inspiration is manifest, too, in a
society awash with innocent blood, the gift of Roe v. Wade. The
slaughter of over fifty million defenseless children, helpless in their
mothers' wombs, lies heavily on our conscience. And NOW efforts are
under away to EXTEND the reach of Roe v. Wade to include the murder of
babies even AFTER their emergence into the light of day, despite the
guarantees of American citizenship that they have thus acquired.

For years Princeton University's
professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, three of whose grandparents died
at Auschwitz, has, for all of that, been agitating in the classroom and
in forums organized by the media for the legalization of infanticide,
the killing of the newly born. So, too, President Barack Obama (Planned
Parenthood's best ever friend), early in his career as senator in the
state legislature of Illinois, cast his vote (as things turned out, the
only such vote) to deny medical assistance to infants that survive a
botched abortion. And now just within the last few weeks two
prominent "bioethicists" from Australia published in the Journal of Medical Ethicsa new appeal for the legalization of
infanticide, the killing of infants AFTER they are born,
whenever their mothers, experiencing post-partum
a change of mind, decide that, all things considered, they really would
prefer not be bothered with motherhood. And it goes without saying that
euthanasia, murder at the other
end of life's spectrum, seems more and more to be "the next progressive
thing." (Witness Washington state and Oregon). The satanic
"culture of death" is spreading like a plague.

May I share with you here an astonishing report from that splendid (and highly readable)
magazine The Weekly Standard.
(If I had to restrict my reading to only one magazine, this is the magazine I would
choose.)

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Declaring
War on Newborns
Andrew Ferguson The Weekly Standard,
March 9, 2012

On the list of the world's most unnecessary
occupations - aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism
professor, vice president of the United States - that of medical ethicist ranks very high.
They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and
other outposts of the vast medical-industrial combine, where their job
is to advise the boss to go ahead with what he was going to do anyway
("Put it on the market!" "Pull the plug on the geezer!" ). They also
attend conferences, where they take turns sitting on panels talking
with one another and then sitting in the audience watching panels of
other medical ethicists talking with one another. Their professional
specialty is the "thought experiment," which is the best kind of
experiment because you don't have to buy test tubes or leave the
office. And sometimes they get jobs at universities, teaching other
people to become ethicists. It is a cozy, happy world they live in.

But it was painfully roiled last
month, when a pair of medical ethicists took to their profession's
bible, the Journal of Medical Ethics,
and published an essay with a misleadingly inconclusive title:
"After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?" It was a misleading
title because the authors believe the answer to the questions is:
"Beats me."

Right at the top, the ethicists summarized the point of their article. "What we call 'after-birth abortion'
(killing a NEWBORN) should be PERMISSIBLE in ALL the cases where
ABORTION is permissible, including cases where the newborn is NOT
disabled."

The argument made by the authors
- Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, both of them affiliated with
prestigious universities in Australia and ethicists of pristine
reputation - runs as follows. Let's suppose a woman gets pregnant. She
decides to go ahead with and have the baby on the assumption
that her personal circumstances, and her views on such things as
baby-raising, will remain the same through the day she gives birth and
beyond.

Then she gives birth.
Perhaps the baby is disabled or
suffers a disease. Perhaps her boyfriend or (if she's
old-fashioned) her husband abandons her, leaving her in financial peril. Or perhaps she's
decided that she's just not the
mothering kind, for, as the authors write, "having a child can itself be an UNBEARABLE
BURDEN for the psychological health of the woman or for her already
existing children, REGARDLESS of the condition of the fetus."

The authors point out that each
of these conditions - the baby is sick or suffering, the baby
will be a financial hardship, the baby will be personally troublesome -
IS NOW LARGELY ACCEPTED as a
GOOD reason for a mother to ABORT her baby BEFORE he's born. So why not
AFTER?

"When circumstances occur after birth such that they
would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion
should be permissible (Their italics.) [The clumsiness of their
English matches the sloppiness of their thought]. Western societies APPROVE abortion because
they have reached a consensus that a FETUS is NOT a PERSON; they should
acknowledge that by the SAME definition A NEWBORN ISN'T A PERSON
EITHER. Neither fetus nor baby has developed a sufficient SENSE of his
own life to know what it would be like to be deprived of it. The
kid will never know the difference, in other words. A newborn baby is just a fetus who's hung
around a bit too long.

As the authors acknowledge, this makes an "after-birth abortion" a
tricky business. You have to get to
the infant BEFORE he develops "those properties that JUSTIFY the
attribution of a right to life to an individual." It's a race
against time.

The article doesn't go on
for more than 1,500 words, but for non-ethicists
it has a high surprise-per-word ratio. The information that
newborn babies aren't people is just
the beginning. A reader learns that "many NON-human animals ... are PERSONS"
and therefore enjoy a "RIGHT to life." (Such ruminative
ruminants, unlike babies, are self-aware enough to know that getting
killed will entail a "loss of value.") The
authors don't fell us which species these "non-human persons" belong
to, but IT'S safe to say that you don't want to take a medical ethicist
to dinner at Outback.

But what about adoption, you
ask. The authors ask that question, too, noting that some
people - you and me, for example - might think that adoption could buy enough time for
the unwanted newborn to technically become
a person and "possibly increase the happiness of the people involved."
But this is not a viable option, if you'll forgive the expression. A mother who kills her newborn baby, the
authors report, is forced to "accept the irreversibility of the
loss." By contrast, a mother who gives her baby up for
adoption "might suffer psychological distress." And for a very
simple reason: These mothers
"often dream that their child will return to them. This makes it
difficult to accept the reality of the loss because they can never be
quite sure whether or not it is irreversible." It's simpler for all concerned just to make
sure the loss CAN'T be reversed. IT'LL SPARE MOM a lot of
heartbreak.

Now, it's at this point in the Journal
of Medical Ethics that many readers will begin to suspect, as I did, that their legs
are being not very subtly pulled. The inversion that the argument
entails is Swiftian - a twenty-first
century Modest Proposal without the cannibalism (for now).
[Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Anglican priest and, in his later years,
dean of St. Patrick's Church in Dublin, author of Guliver's Travels, wrote with
tongue in cheek, A Modest Proposal,
to protest English misrule in Ireland, suggesting that perhaps the next
step in England's government of the Irish would be to kill the children
of the poor so as to provide food for the tables of the rich.] Jonathan
Swift's original Modest Proposal called for killing Irish children to
prevent them "from being a burden to their parents." It was death by compassion, the killing of
innocents based on a surfeit of fellow-feeling. The authors agree that compassion itself
DEMANDS the death of newborns. Unlike Swift, though, THEY aren't
kidding.

They got you coming and going, these guys. They assume - and they won't get much argument from their
peers in the profession - that
"mentally impaired" infants are eligible for elimination because they
will never develop the properties necessary to be fully human. Then
they discuss Treacher-Collins syndrome, which causes facial deformities
and respiratory ailments but no mental impairment. Kids with TCS
are "fully aware of their condition,
of being different from other people and of all the problems
their pathology entails," and are therefore, to spare them a life of such unpleasant
awareness, eligible for elimination too - because they are not mentally impaired. The
threshold to this "right to life" just gets higher and higher, the more
you think about it. [As editor of the Harvard
Law Review Barack Obama contributed only one comment, no major
article, in a break with tradition. This comment took the form of a
footnote to another author's essay. The footnote supported the thesis
that abortion in the inner city is an act of mercy, saving the fetus
from growing up DOOMED to a lifetime of pain. and despair].

And of course it is their business
to think about it. It's what medical ethicists get paid to do: cogitate, cogitate,
cogitate. As "After-birth Abortion" spread around the world and gained
wide publicity - that damned Internet -
non-ethicists greeted it with derision or shock or worse. The
authors and the editor of the Journal
of Medical Ethics were themselves shocked at the response. As
their inboxes flooded with hate mail, the authors composed an apology
of sorts that non-ethicists will find more revealing even than the
original paper.

"We are really SORRY that many
people, WHO DO NOT SHARE THE BACKGROUND of the INTENDED audience for
this article, felt offended, outraged, or even threatened," they wrote.
"The article was SUPPOSED to be read by other fellow bioethicists
who were ALREADY familiar-
with this topic and our arguments." It was a thought experiment. After all,
among medical ethicists "this debate"
- about when it's proper to kill babies - "has been going on for 40 years."

So that's
what they've been talking about in all those panel discussions! The
authors thought they were merely taking the next step in a train of logic
that was set in motion, and has been widely accepted, since their
profession was invented in the 1960s. And
of course they were. The outrage directed at their article came from
laymen - people unsophisticated in contemporary ethics. Medical
ethicists in general expressed few objections, only a minor annoyance
that the authors had let the cat out of the bag. A few days
after it was posted the article was removed from the PUBLICLY accessible area of the Journal's website, sending it back
to that happy, cozy world.

You'd have to be very, very well trained in ethics to see the authors' argument
as a morally acceptable
extension of their premises, but you can't deny the logic of it. The rest of us will see
in the argument an extension of its premises into self-indulgent
absurdity. Pro-lifers should take
note.

And now we know the pro-choice
position is that children born with a FACIAL deformity should be
executed, too, as long as you get to them quick enough. Unwittingly the
insouciant authors of "After-birth Abortion" have shown where
pro-choicers wind up IF they follow
their beliefs about fetuses to its LOGICAL end. They've
performed a public service. Could it be that medical ethicists really are more useful than
aromatherapists?
[Emphasis added].